


you were beautiful before you were told so,

by carlemon



Category: IT (2017), IT - Stephen King
Genre: Alternate Universe - Soulmates, Dorks in Love, Multi, Non-Sexual Intimacy, Polyamory, Singalongs
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-12-09
Updated: 2017-12-09
Packaged: 2019-02-12 16:54:27
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,299
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/12964020
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/carlemon/pseuds/carlemon
Summary: just like you are lovedeven when you cannot feel it.In which soulmates are bound by a colour that appears when they touch lovingly for the first time.





	you were beautiful before you were told so,

**Author's Note:**

> title + summary from [cancer](http://apoeticmythos.tumblr.com/post/143412893839/aries-i-am-sorry-for-your-angry-fists-but).

They sit intertwined in the breezy dregs of summer, hands linked, feet touching. Beverly Marsh reclines perched atop Ben Hanscom, a testimony to male pulchritude and compassion unto himself, and blinks slowly and with leisure, relishing the idle play of dusky light atop her bared burnt shoulders.

Surely, she thinks, surely this must be paradise, or something along those lines. Though the Barrens smell strangely of brine and decomposing bracken she sees the tossing waves of beaches and youthful freedom with each breath; perched atop the slight grassy knoll where Derry bleeds into tender, wholesome wilderness and warm light, she is mired in it. Nothing else matters. She shifts to shake out her dead leg and catches from the space left behind by her hitched-up cotton shirt a glimpse of fire-engine red, shamelessly lurid. Richie'd sown it there the first time he'd rested a loopy arm 'round her hip, pulling her close against him. _Tastes like a cigarette should. Tastes like a cigarette should, Bev, is it okay if I—_

Now he sits at the crest of their knoll, the hill of moist flaxen grass (verdant as new life, as girltale emeralds perfumed in the fecund smell of overripe apples and humid, marshy vegetation) his throne and Eddie sprawling half onto, half off his lap. They share marks matching in messiness, in casual affection. She knows the small of Eddie's back bears a feathery spray of candy red, of sunset red; meanwhile, peeking out of the collar of Richie's Freese's shirt gleams a smattering of muted, peachy colour, the two of them a palette of dawnlight, at home in the rising sun. _Just peachy,_ Eddie'd cried, _this is just fucking peachy, it looks like I'm bleeding out my shirt!_ They'd all laughed as he smiled helplessly. Richie'd kissed him, his open laughing mouth glancing recklessly off Eddie's.

Richie has an aniseed taste, a liquorice taste sickly on her tongue when he'd kissed her first over cigarettes and honey lifesavers. It'd thrown her off, but was and still is much preferable to the acrid biting reek of stale smoke down her tonsils. She knows now it hadn't been just her— Eddie told her he'd tasted it too, (with a lot of spluttering and dithering) so it had to be a _Them_ thing. _Their_ thing. A _Mark_ thing, a thing for _Them_ alone.

Later, Stan would confess he'd tasted it too. He sits now tucked into the valley formed by Bill and Mike's strong seamed-together thighs, the three of them bound by a chain graduating from two sprays of colour on either side of the junction between Bill's neck and shoulder (Stan's whimsical periwinkle blue, Mike's fertile lime green of new beginnings and green apple Kool-Aid) to Stan’s waist and wrist, to Mike’s hip and sternum. When he moves his hands from his lap to shield his eyes from the wandering dappled light and look at her, she sees the violet posy of Bill’s uncertain, meandering touch, a little bracelet ‘round his delicate, fine-boned edges.

She has those same mists of lilac (that summer-hydrangea hue, welcoming and _true)_ tinting her knuckles (from elementary, when Bill’d taken her hands before he kissed her. _Is this okay?_ mouthed with not a stutter to mar it. _I’m cuh-comin’ in now—_ and she’d laughed, sweetly jejune and artless) and she curls them into an idle fist in idler salute. Stan smiles with Bill to cradle him and Mike to kiss from his pointed nose all his worries, unruffled despite the points of the unkept grass in which they sit. She smiles back. His blue oil-pastel thumbprints, bloomed from the first time she’d let him idle beside her and run a comb through her hair, (the both of them snorting and sighing in incredulity and mirth when it snapped in two) warm the back of her neck. Richie’s red, her own rich maroon— they’re almost too lush, too vibrant for him, certainly an odd juxtaposition against Mike’s smudges of fern, Eddie’s and Ben’s of cream and orange respectively, but they work.

It all works.

Ben stirs below her then. Beverly blinks at him sedately, and across her rested mouth curves an easy, smitten smile. At the side of her neck, (when they’d near-kissed, if not for Richie’s bawling intervention— _lookie what we have here! Not Haystack, surely not!)_ his lick of spring tangerine blends into Mike’s touch when the latter’d pulled her upright off the stile on his farm, muddling together to make a chartreuse the precise hue of an unripe pear. She settles into the warmth of him and he shifts with an unwilling fluid motion, left out in the sun too long and rendered too soft to function.

“Ben?” It does not prick the tongue of Beverly Marsh to say his name; rather, it flows rolling over the soft consonants like molasses. Her fingernails, painted the exact shade of the flourishing burgundy prints on either side of his jaw (when they’d kissed, for real), inspect the boys’ affections painted all over his shoulders, sides, calves, Eddie’s roseate touch a tattoo of tenderness etched into his belly. (From when they’d patched him up, she figures. When they’d put him back together again before making each other whole as well.)

Ben speaks half-hopeful, half-assured. “Yeah, Bev?” He grins soppily, helplessly when she sweeps a loose lock of hair out of his forehead, meeting his eyes with a scintillating matching grin. Out of the corner of her eye Bill hazards her a cocked eyebrow, glowing dimly red in the fuzzy waver of evening heat.

“I just want you to know,” she tells Ben, “that I will always love you.”

And then she begins to sing.

“Oh, baby—” (Eddie snorts hard, through his nose, trying to avert his eyes out of courtesy) “Tell me you’ll stay,” (Richie, who does not possess even the semblance of said courtesy, compounds her off-key song with a high, warbling falsetto) “Never ever go away,” (Stan’s eyes shut, brow visibly furrowing underneath Bill’s placating touch in perhaps an effort to resist rolling his eyes or most likely, _god forbid,_ joining in) “I need you, I need you—”

Mike’s clear voice breaks their dim burble. “I guess I always will. Girl, you’re my best friend,”

“Guh-girl, you’re my _llllllove_  within,” Stan whips his head to Bill; they share a crimped, secretive smile as they curl further into Mike. From atop Ben, Bev conducts them all, shuddering with laughter at Richie’s efforts, all of them together a kaleidoscope of love and love and _love_ , the everlasting kind. They’d pissed about plenty the first time it’d happened, (the first time they’d discovered it was indeed, a _Them_ thing) slapping their hands onto each other every chance they got ‘til Bill had to forcibly separate them, delighted at the flushes of colour that sprang into life. Those had faded, (like the bruises up Beverly Marsh’s arms, like those still half-lingering over Eddie’s once-broken arm) but the initial touches remained.

She likes to think that they grow brighter, more vivid, with each passing day. Stan’s lovely lilting voice, his honey, singing voice, thrums through her bones. “I just want you to know that I will always love you.”

Richie caws: “Oh baby!” 

Eddie promptly chokes with cackling laughter on his lines. “Tell me you’ll stay—”

When they come ‘round to Ben they’re a technicolor mess of giggles and touches. Hands linked, feet touching, all of Derry confined to a quickly-vanishing point in the distance. Periwinkle, violet, lime, tangerine, maroon, peach, harsh unashamed candy-red. Muddled together, Bev’d found it made a spectrum not even half-bad.

Ben holds her close. He sings, “Please don’t go, girl,” in a cadence like birdsong, and she dissolves into the red-white rays of the setting sun and a kiss filled with citrus and light. 


End file.
